Compelling Conversations with Dolphins and Whales in the Wild: Vital Lessons for Living in Joy and Healing our World

By Bobbie Merrill

A Book for These Times ...

She dove into the ocean simply to play with wild dolphins and whales, but emerged a decade later a different person with a collection of life-changing lessons that not only drew her soul mate to her, but also reveal how we can all live better lives and heal our world.<

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bobbie Merrill
• Release date: Apr 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781734448009

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

What You’ll Find in This Book

Compelling Conversations is divided into four parts.

Part I contains the full story of My Unexpected Discovery of Teachers Beneath the Horizon. It starts with how I became acquainted with the dolphins—first at a hotel in Hawai‘i and then in the wild—and the infusion of love in me that ensued. Part I also introduces my growing awareness of six special character traits that were consistently present in the dolphins I came to observe, know, and love.

In Part II, Lessons from the Dolphins: Six Special Traits of the Higher Self, I share in greater detail the dolphins’ special traits—all attributes that resonate with the Higher Self available to each of us. These include such qualities as kindness and friendship; playful humor and joy; harmony; exceptional intelligence used wisely; telepathic transparency; and the power of the heart.

Part III, Creating the World of Your Dreams: Six Insights for Manifesting Your Goals, introduces six unusual insights about new ways to manifest our dreams that were unveiled during my extensive time with dolphins and whales. It also includes a chapter about four major trips I made to test the insights the cetaceans were giving me.

The final section of this book is Part IV, A Change of Subject. Giving Back to the Dolphins and Whales. In it, I sound the alarm about what’s at stake in our world—and why learning the lessons of how to become our best selves will not only make us feel happier and more fulfilled, but will also enable us to survive. I expose the source and harsh truth about the mysterious rise in the deaths of dolphins and whales—and talk about where their hope and ours lies.

I then share the scientific principle of mirror neurons, what it would look like to engage them to start a wave of kindness—or even a full global Kindness Movement—and why the movement would work to stop cetacean deaths and so much more! Finally, I invite you to take an honest look at our destiny—both the cetaceans’ and ours, for we are intertwined—and join the Kindness Movement as the last hope for all of our survival.

My hope is that the full scope of Compelling Conversations—from magic to holocaust—will not only dramatically enhance your personal life, but will awaken our species to the power and possibilities that living in our kindness and greatness offers. I hope that in the process, this book will show us how to survive. If enough of us band together as our best selves in the pursuit of a new world filled with caring, kindness, justice, and joy, we can create a tipping point that will carry all of us there.

A world filled with kindness is a real possibility that offers us real hope if enough of us get on board. So, read Compelling Conversations with this in mind, and see if you will be one of those who not only experiences new levels of personal power and joy as you read, but who will be drawn to contribute to a wave of kindness and a better world through either passive or active involvement.

Chapter quotes are mine unless otherwise indicated.

Spread love everywhere you go.

—Mother Teresa

My Unexpected Discovery of Teachers Beneath the Horizon

The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, and lovers of all kinds.

—His Holiness, The Dalai Lama

Although I first dove into the ocean simply to swim and play with the dolphins, I emerged ten years later with a precious collection of life-changing lessons that helped me to be a better person living a better life.

This book is designed to take you on the same journey I was blessed to enjoy so that you too can surface with some of the dolphins’ magic in your own heart and life, while also helping to build a new world of kindness and magic for all.

New Teachers Introduce New Lessons

When I first began in 1989 to swim in the wild with dolphins and whales, life for me was good, but not nearly as good as it is now. Although I initially swam with my new friends simply for the fun of it, they surprised me with their remarkable level of intelligence, functioning, and altruism, which I had not realized cetaceans possessed and was initially reluctant to fully accept.

I was also suspicious of their ability to communicate with me and even more skeptical that their messages could improve my life. Moreover, the idea that dolphins could or would teach me—or anyone—an array of lessons is a challenging concept for most people to absorb, and I was no exception.

Thus, even when they gave me ample and repeated proof of their ability, first to converse with me and to then teach me complex concepts, my doubts about their capacity to do this lingered longer than was warranted.

But during the course of the next ten years and over two thousand hours of free swimming throughout the world with dolphins and whales, I was not only taken on a magical journey, but was also given a glimpse into the astounding world of wisdom in which the dolphins and whales dwell.

Although I persisted throughout most of this journey to seek repeated proof of the surreal abilities of the cetaceans, at last there was a turning point, and they won me over. That’s also the moment when I made my final decision to write this book chronicling their lessons, which not only impacted my personal development, but also provided the missing pieces to the happiness puzzle my clients and I had been seeking. Even more surprising, they were also the pieces that had the ability to help my species become a greater, happier humanity, better able to survive.

Because of my own preliminary doubts about the dolphins’ ability to teach me such valued lessons, I have included references to studies to support my observations. These will hopefully help readers to break through the same kinds of doubts I initially had so that they too can reap the full value of the lessons.

As a result of my eventual surrender to cetacean wisdom, I was able to accept and use the lessons they taught me about ways to dramatically improve my life. And it’s those lessons I now share with you in Compelling Conversations with Wild Dolphins and Whales with the hope that you will benefit as much as I have.

The dolphin’s way is not to fall from grace in the first place.

—Peter Russell

The Dolphins Lure Me to Them

Stay as aware of your thoughts and actions as you would if a beloved master were observing you, for this will prompt your Higher Self to come forth in an effort to impress the master, and in the process, draw life’s goodness to you.

I needed to think. I needed to face the stark reality that my marriage was falling apart. So I headed for my favorite spot at the Kahala Hotel, where I often went to do my thinking and to soothe myself. Normally, I went to this special spot alone, but on this day, Tom wanted to go with me to walk along the beach together with the hope we might have a successful conversation to clear up the mess of the fight we had just had. But, it didn't take long before we engaged in yet another one of our spats that had been recently escalating, so Tom elected to wait in the restaurant until I was ready to leave.

The Lagoon Dolphins Open a New Door

Rather than finish my walk, I decided to visit the hotel’s dolphins that I had befriended at the start of our separation. So, I found my favorite cluster of smooth rocks at the edge of the dolphins’ lagoon fronting the interior units and gardens of the hotel and nestled myself into them. As I watched the dolphins glide through the water, rather than feel soothed as I usually did, I felt increasingly unsettled by my growing awareness that my marriage was about to collapse. Facing the truth of this led to rising worries over how I would cope and what to do next. I had committed the greater part of my adult years to this union, and the thought of calling it quits and finishing life’s journey on my own stirred up new layers of disquiet in me.

As I anxiously imagined living alone in a less secure and pleasant condo, one of my favorite dolphins, Maka, swam toward me with a tourist’s visor tucked under his fin. He then barely released the visor before quickly diving under the water to retrieve it and then drop it again. As I puzzled over what Maka was doing, he surfaced directly in front of me with the hat askew on his head and his eyes dancing impishly into mine. Taken aback by his silly image, I began to laugh. Maka seemed quite pleased with this result and repeated his trick over and over until I was able to forget about my fears of the future and surrender to simply enjoying his show. I wasn’t sure at the time why the hotel dolphins had such a soothing effect on me, but I knew that our growing bond over the past few years had relieved some of the loneliness of my fading relationship. Once Maka had accomplished his mission, I stood to leave. But as I was gathering my things, I noticed that the dearest of my dolphin friends, Iwa, was slowly approaching me from the other end of the lagoon, so I waited to greet her. The moment Iwa got to where I was standing, she uncharacteristically positioned herself upright in the water before me and held this position for a full minute or so, while locking her gaze directly into mine. I had never seen Iwa sit upright before, nor had she ever looked at me in this direct, frontal manner. Her more typical side gazes were always very penetrating, but now she seemed to be looking both at and past me, to something beyond, as if reading the entire energy field surrounding my body and head.

As I pondered Iwa's unusual behavior and what she might be seeing, she sent a strong surge of love from her heart to mine. I felt mysteriously honored by this outpouring of love coming from Iwa and the upright position she continued to hold as she kept her gaze fixed on me. Although I was perplexed by its meaning, whatever it was, the mixture of Iwa’s deep soulful gaze and the strength of her kind energy prompted a stream of tears to well up in me. When these long-held tears finally broke through to spill their warmth down my cheeks, the intensity of my fear of living on my own seemed to wash away with them.

I had not started to visit the hotel dolphins until a few weeks after my separation from Tom, and it was during my first visit that a special friendship with Iwa began when she dashed over to greet me upon my arrival. She repeated this behavior every time I visited and would then glide back and forth in front of me with an unblinking eye fixed on mine as I gazed with equal intensity back at her. I often felt locked into these gazes and lost in a dreamy trance as Iwa would continue to pull me through the portals of her eyes into the gentleness of her heart.

I realized that these gazes were rapidly drawing me out of my awake, beta state and into the more relaxed alpha realm I experienced while meditating. Next, they would pull me even deeper through the ranges of alpha into a slower theta trance, just short of slipping all the way into the dreaminess of a delta sleep state. These experiences matched the special times I had successfully fallen into deep meditation, and I was in awe of how quickly Iwa was able to pull me into the same dopamine-drenched state that had taken me years to achieve while sitting on my couch.

Next, Iwa would aim the top of her head toward me in a deliberate manner, as if to scan my body or send me some of her healing energy before turning back to look at me again. We would then resume our gaze and remain locked and lost in the moment, as she pulled me even more deeply into the cadence and symphony of her brainwaves and heart.

In time, I learned to send her love from my heart as well, and I always came away feeling as though I were emerging from the fullness of a soothing meditation. Although I had noticed that Iwa seemed to be the most conscious dolphin in the lagoon, it wasn’t until years later that I learned she had been born and raised in the wild before her capture. During those extra years in the ocean with her family, Iwa had been given a unique opportunity to learn things from them that dolphins born in captivity or captured while still very young do not have the chance to learn.

I felt a good deal lighter and more at peace after spending some playful time with Maka, followed by my deeper than usual connection with Iwa. When I then walked with renewed serenity to the restaurant where Tom was enjoying a soda and the view, we were both happy to let go of our disagreement and move on.

Dolphins in the Wild

Soon after that healing evening with the lagoon dolphins, I met a man who had been free swimming with a group of wild dolphins in the waters off of Diamond Head. They had been meeting with him just a short distance down the beach from the hotel and to the left of the famed Diamond Head Point separating Waikiki Beach from the Diamond Head lighthouse and a strip of luxury real estate. He reported that although dolphins are not mentioned in the early lore of Hawaiians, several groups of them were now beginning to appear to boaters, and some were even meeting with swimmers off the shores of our beaches and bays.

I later learned that the reason we hadn’t heard about people connecting with Hawai‘i’s dolphins prior to this is because close and personal encounters with cetaceans was a new phenomenon that was only recently taking place in Hawai‘i and throughout the world. Although evidence shows that dolphins interfaced with the Greeks during the Renaissance and that individual dolphins have sporadically met with humans during subsequent centuries, pods of dolphins meeting with humans on a regular basis didn’t begin until the mid-1980s.

Upon learning about these more frequent meetings, it dawned on me that dolphins had been swimming in the ocean with us during our days of body and board surfing as kids. But during that period of growing up in Hawai‘i, my friends and I weren’t aware that dolphins lived in our waters, so we failed to notice them on the days they were nearby or periodically surfacing to peek at us. And, on the rare occasion when we saw their fins bobbing up and down along the horizon, we simply assumed they were sharks and quickly exited the water. We didn’t realize at the time that the up-and-down motion of the fins we saw moving through the water were actually quite different from the side-to-side motion used by Hawaiian sharks or the straight-line movement of the great white shark (rarely seen in Hawaiian waters).

Excited by the idea of participating in this new adventure of swimming with dolphins, I invited a group of friends I had grown up with in Hawai‘i to join me in a search for our Hawaiian spinners, known for their ability to spin their bodies joyfully into the air. My friends were also eager to connect with the dolphins we had failed to notice as kids, and though we had great fun during our trips to various islands in pursuit of them, we didn’t encounter any dolphins during those first efforts—other than once hearing their chirps, letting us know they were nearby, (which I later learned was their way of teasing us). Although we didn’t know it at the time, each of us would ultimately have a number of very special encounters with dolphins and whales, most of them separately, but one of them as a group celebrating one of our birthdays.

Mine began when I heard about a handful of people who were swimming with a second pod of O‘ahu spinners on the opposite side of the island from the Diamond Head group. Ironically, their beach was located in the rural area where I was born and had lived for a year—so I was even more drawn to swim with this particular pod. Because Tom’s interest in the dolphins was also piquing, we decided to go to their beach together in hopes of an encounter.

Unfortunately, as Tom and I began our drive to Makua Beach the next day, we engaged in another one of our spats and then drove in moody silence for the remainder of the trip. Although the dolphins were reported by others to have been playing with swimmers in the water prior to our arrival, they had left the area just before we got there. When this pattern repeated the following week, we began to suspect that our irritable energies might be repelling these goodnatured beings. Our hunch was confirmed by a swimmer familiar with the dolphins, who reported that they approach some people right away, but make others wait before connecting. This pattern seemed to offer those being rebuffed an opportunity to become more conscious of what quality in them might be unattractive to the dolphins, a quality they would benefit from correcting.

As I began to reflect on what in me might need improving, it didn’t take long to uncover the problem. Tom’s and my energies had become unpleasant as we each looked to the other to change if we were going to save our marriage, rather than address what in ourselves might need correcting. When I shared this possibility with Tom, he agreed. So we committed to driving to the beach later that day without bickering about our rising irritations with each other.

Once we arrived, we didn’t see any dolphins as hoped, so we paddled our kayak out into the water, where we sat calmly talking in more depth than usual. By each taking responsibility for our part in the problems between us, rather than continuing to blame the other, our communication was kinder and clearer than it had been for some time. When we returned to shore, others reported that the dolphins had been circling in a wide swath around us the entire time we were sitting in the kayak, and although we hadn’t seen them, it was clear that their presence had impacted our communication.

Following this experience, we both knew that whether or not we stayed together, we would treat each other with more care. This was the beginning of my experience with wild dolphins, though I had not yet swum with them. And even though they had exerted a profound impact on me as I sat in a kayak in their midst that day, these brilliant and beautiful beings were just getting started. Tom and I decided to return to the beach the following day in hopes of making an even closer connection with these friendly and profound Makua Beach dolphins.

Whenever you’re filled with attractive energies, the goodness of life will feel pulled in your direction and, in time, will draw near enough to share its blessings with you.

Profound Teachers

An assemblage of dancing dolphins are coming to the world’s shores to inspire humanity by sharing their secrets for finding happiness and joy.

Following a peaceful drive to the beach the morning after Tom and I had successfully remained calm with each other while sitting in our kayak, we found a good parking space at the edge of the water. As we were parking, a single dolphin leapt playfully out of the water just a few feet from shore, and at the top of his leap, he glanced briefly in our direction. We had never seen a dolphin come that close to the beach, and we quickly sensed that he had come to herald our first swim with the dolphins that day.

Unexpected Lessons

My breath quickened as I sensed this call to play, and we both excitedly collected our snorkels and fins. But by the time we got organized and made our way to the beach, a handful of swimmers were emerging from the water, all talking at once about their vigorous swim with the dolphins and feeling ready for a rest.

My heart sank with worry that we had come too late, but I tried to keep my thoughts upbeat as we grabbed our gear and ran to the water’s edge. By now, my heart was racing, and my breath was short and shallow. Although I realized I was on the verge of hyperventilating, I entered the water without any of my usual indecision or concern about the cold.

The moment I submerged my head in the water, I could hear a dolphin chirping. I chirped back through my snorkel, and he